Its not merely the way forward- its the whole problem. Nothing of this is at all challenging methodologically or technologically- scientists, as a group, are m

Its not merely the way forward- its the whole problem. Nothing of this is at all challenging methodologically or technologically- scientists, as a group, are masters of such things. The challenge is social. If you've failed to reproduce a result, this could be due to the original experimenter's flawed work, or your own mistakes, or unnoticed ambiguities in the experimental method, etc. There's no way to publish a negative replication without implicitly asserting, in the eyes of your fellows, that the original researcher did it wrong- its not what a negative result logically shows, but this is just how humans work. Jumping the gap between what you've shown and how your publication will be socially received takes substantial courage- scientific careers are fragile!